Why is the big-budget flop Warcraft, a Hollywood adaptation of the videogame World of Warcraft, so awful? Reviewers have clobbered it, like a guild of Holy Paladins wielding Warhammers of Arrogance. Indiewire critic David Ehrlich calls Universal’s film “a once-in-a-generation disaster, one of the most ill-advised and ill-conceived studio films of this modern blockbuster era.” Here’s one theory: Warcraft is a poor copy of a copy of a copy, because we are already living in a simulation. All the world’s a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, as Shakespeare’s avatar might say, and all the men and women merely sims.
At least that’s what futurist Elon Musk recently argued, citing the rapid, forty-year evolution from Pong to “photorealistic 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously” in games like World of Warcraft. “If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality,” he said. If such lifelike simulations are standard among intelligent life, and there are billions of such systems, he said, “the odds we’re in base reality is one in billions.”
It’s a fascinating thought experiment, but the founder of Tesla and SpaceOne bases it on a flawed, tech-centric assumption. By defining the evolution of virtual worlds as the inevitable result of higher bit rates, ever-more-sophisticated algorithms, and ever-bigger clouds of data, Elon Musk presumes they will feel more real merely because they’re rendered with better technology.
But that’s only part of the equation. Creating simulated — let’s just call them fictional — worlds isn’t the same as iterating better batteries for electric cars or flight paths for spaceships. It will never just be a science. It will always also be an art.
As it turns out, we’re pretty good at this sort of thing, but it’s damn hard. Whatever we are — Matrix-style pod creatures, particularly elegant algorithms, or base-reality humans — people (or humanoid avatars) have been simulating life for millennia in paintings and music and novels and comic books and television series and films. The rapidly evolving story of videogames and virtual reality, which Musk cites, has built upon this history of artistic invention. But that history hasn’t been one of predictable progress, exponential or otherwise.
Take Warcraft, the huge-budget, state-of-the-art fantasy film that premiered June 10 and tanked at the American box-office, where it’s abysmal per-screen average is fast becoming the stuff of nightmarish myth and legend. (The film did perform well in its opening weekend in China, where Warcraft has a large fan base and the film was pushed into 67 percent of theaters.) Obviously, there have been horrible videogame movies before, from Super Mario Bros. and Mortal Kombat to Max Payne and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. But this film, directed by Duncan Jones and boosted by an exorbitant marketing campaign, may be America’s most high-profile videogame flop ever.
In Hollywood, “videogame-like” has been an unfair insult — implying that all games are unrealistic, cartoonish, or preoccupied with button-mashing action, when they’re not. Having endured this movie, I can assure you Warcraft lives down to that slur, but its worst faults are not particularly videogame-like. Rather, Warcraft fails because it embodies the worst of contemporary Hollywood.
An open world, annexed by Hollywood
The grab-bag mythology of World of Warcraft (the game) was never the point. The story, such as it was, was always secondary to the transformative gameplay that allowed twelve million gamers to build an unprecedentedly massive online community, forming international guilds, cross-cultural online alliances, and whole virtual economies. But, like a lot of merely mediocre adaptations — literary, comic book, or otherwise — the film Warcraft doesn’t take advantage of that freedom. It’s neither a bold reinvention or a faithful tribute; it’s a bloated, grab-bag of spectacle.
In the place of the game’s open-world freedom, this thudding film settles for a heavy-handed, fan-fiction collage, mashing up so many fantasy clichés that it feels as if it was scripted by Keyser Soze in the Comic-Con gift-shop. It’s not just filled with generic RPG swords and sorcery (Dungeons & Dragons); there’s the light and dark side of a life force (Star Wars), giant orcs who turn green when they’re really angry (Hulk), elves and dwarves who refuse to come to the aid of humans in the face of an apocalyptic orc threat (again, Lord of the Rings), an orphaned baby sent down a river in a basket (The Old Testament), and dozens of other echoes, including way too much noble-savage, Avatar-meets-Tarzan mumbo-jumbo.
Plot-wise, there’s a war for the future of two worlds that’s fought between orcs and humans. Some orc is always rambling on about how folks (or orcs) should “respect the old ways,” yet most orcs have no problem kidnapping innocents and feeding their souls to a genocidal, demonic sorcerer who looks like a cross between a Sleestak, Skeletor, and Iron Maiden’s animatronic Eddie mascot. I’d elaborate on the plot, but since that is something this film barely bothers to do, I’ll just note that the movie is far less interested in telling a coherent story than it is in creating a very big world. And that’s what feels so symptomatic of modern Hollywood.
Though Warcraft has a massive, global audience, the film doesn’t fail because it panders to minutiae-obsessed fans. It doesn’t miss the beautifully-rendered forest for the beautifully rendered trees. No, it misses the forest for the realms and then misses the realms in a doomed attempt to map out a whole franchise-friendly universe. (Whole races are introduced that have nothing to do with this film.) Flyover animations introduce kingdoms and cloud castles, burned out forests and vast animated armies—all of which look lovely but rarely matter. Tellingly, the film prominently features hexagonal, nonsensical maps, which echo the original game and suggest empires we never see, uselessly putting the cartography before the source.
In the big bellowing TV trailer for Warcraft, a big bellowing voice booms a junketing journalist’s overblown rave that the movie is “bigger than any world you’ve ever imagined.” That quote is literal nonsense. It’s like saying, Our franchise goes to eleven. But that bigness is surely why Universal was so hellbent on franchising Warcraft. The studio must have seen this as less as a movie than as a landgrab. It’s why Hollywood producers now refer to stories as properties.
Over the past few decades, blockbuster filmmaking has become less concerned with stories and (human) stars than branded worlds. Chasing the next Marvel Comics Universe, they’re not just looking for a hit. They’re looking for the next big bang: a flash that creates a wide-open new universe that can be populated with product.
So you can see why a Hollywood studio would crave an open-world videogame like World of Warcraft, because it’s purposely built to be empty: the bulldozed foundation of a franchise, ripe for development. By the end of the film, Duncan Jones seems less concerned with tying up plot threads than delivering a third act composed of little more than unsatisfying cliffhangers, seeds for sequels, and end-credit teasers (a baby, a betrayal, an escape, a death). He hasn’t so much told a story as he has cleared the floor and dumped out a box of toys.
Obviously, many (if not most) gamers ignore story mode altogether. In my limited experience in the The World of Warcraft, I could project myself into its fantasy realm and make my own fun. In Warcraft, I felt trapped, like I was watching someone else mash all the wrong buttons.
The Odds Against Reality
Back to Elon Musk. He is so certain that lifelike alternate virtual realities are a technological fait accompli. But crap like Warcraft makes me wonder: If virtual realities depend on human artists to build them, and so much art is so damn bad, aren’t the odds appreciably lower that a fictional world could be as convincing as the Earth we know?
Duncan Jones is a fascinating director. His first two films, Moon and Source Code, earned strong reviews for being the opposite of Warcraft, which is to say: smart. But artists, unlike computer chips, don’t necessarily get better. Over and over, we relearn that the odds of creating just a convincing two-hour experience in a fictional world are long indeed.
Simulating an empty physical environment that looks and feels real seems quite conceivable—the mountains in Warcraft look great — but once you put characters in that world who talk and speak and act, what are the odds that someone could craft a whole world that feels as real as ours?
Such a project would inevitably take an enormous amount of human resources — and given the way big budgets and commercial demands have warped the worlds we create in Hollywood and games, one has to wonder: Even if someone could create a lifelike sim of a world, wouldn’t it be more entertaining than this one?
This is why I believe Musk’s odds are off and that the Earth we know is not a sim: If we were living in a sim, how would it pay for itself? As any Hollywood studio exec might say: Where’s the upside? The tie-ins? The product placement? Wouldn’t the gunplay be more fun? Wouldn’t the workweek be shorter? Why, I dunno, eczema?
Is there even a billion-to-one chance that a virtual-reality production team would make something so noncommercial as our planet? Even now, the likelihood of a Hollywood studio making a film that costs more than $50 million and looks like the real world is shrinking rapidly. Even if such sophisticated virtual simulations do exist somewhere in the universe, as Musk argues, I’d still bet against the idea that we are living in one, since I can’t imagine an exec who would green-light this planet. If such a simulacra does exist, I’d bet that it looks a lot more like Middle Earth than this Earth.
